Efficiency and Effectiveness: Digital Futures in InnovationThe Future of Research. JISC, London. 19 October 2010

Martin Hall Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford

Strand Two: Efficiency and Effectiveness

What strategic advantage can new and future digital technologies offer in advancing the efficiency and effectiveness of research and innovation in our universities?

• Research: the creation of new knowledge across all fields of study

• Innovation: a set of pathways along which new knowledge is translated into useful products and processes

• Efficiency: the ratio between the effort of doing something and the benefits achieved

• Effectiveness: the value of the outcome of doing something

Chasing the “Innovation Quadrant”

With acknowledgement to Donald Stokes, Pasteur’s Quadrant

Quadrants in a time series

The special properties of knowledge

• Moving effectively between research and innovation, and efficiency and effectiveness, requires “friction free” flows of knowledge

• Knowledge has special, well-understood properties: non-excludability, spill-over benefits, cumulative rewards

• The university, and academic life, thrives on giving away knowledge in return for reputational capital (whether in competitions for world rankings or individual career paths)

• Rent-seeking systems of toll-gates and subscriptions, “patent thickets” and defensive IP management adds friction to knowledge exchange, and limits efficiency, effectiveness and innovation

Towards a model University of the Digital Future

• Unpacking efficiency and effectiveness in research and innovation shows how the benefits of new knowledge can best be realized

• Universities have worked this way since the early nineteenth century, using a series of onetime-new technologies

• Digital technologies massively expand capacity for data management, analysis, communication and dissemination

• What would it be like to build a new university for a digital future?

The core: the Open Access Repository

The system: interactions enabled and advanced by digital and analogue technologies

The network: interactions between institutions

Areas of work founded on an Open Access core: a better model than competing quadrants?

An example: Better Life Chances

Research fields: public health, epidemiology, social policy, housing, built environment, security and safeguarding

Partners: local authority, city region, police authority, health services

Potentially: integration into new Local Enterprise Partnership

To conclude

• New technologies for research and innovation offer unrivalled possibilities

• The essence of digital technologies: exponential patterns of expansion, massive data storage, accelerating processing power, almost instant transmission

• Open Access is essential to the efficient and effective use of new technologies. Paywalls and membership systems are inefficient, ineffective and counter progress by imposing friction

• Research and innovation systems can be designed to support both research and innovation through knowledge exchange, and to be sustainable through expert commissioning systems

Thank You